


Please Stay

by Dogsled



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dean is Bad at Feelings, Loneliness, M/M, Men Crying, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Mutually Unrequited, Season/Series 10, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-29
Updated: 2017-09-29
Packaged: 2019-01-06 23:51:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12221496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dogsled/pseuds/Dogsled
Summary: Castiel has never had the most beautiful wings in the garrison. In fact, he's painfully self conscious about the state of them, and when his grace returns in season 10, they're in even more wretched a state than they have ever been. Dean discovers him in a private moment and offers him a helping hand.





	Please Stay

Castiel hissed.

 

This was what he’d feared. When his grace had been slipping from him, weaker and weaker, the pain had been dulled to a full body ache and a buzz in the back of his head like low voltage electrocution.

 

 _Don Quixote_ had tumbled off the shelf, a reprieve and a means to an end. His grace had been reunited with him finally, and Castiel had gobbled his angelhood up with mindless desperation, because Metatron was right: he wasn’t a Winchester, and he was no angel; he had no mission any more.

 

Angel or not, he had spread his wings and the old pain had come right back.

 

His brothers were beautiful. Other than Lucifer, they had handsome plumage in hues of white, brown, black, and every shade in between. Each was as individual as they were handsome. But Castiel? Even as a seraph at his most powerful, his wings had been drab and beaten. The feathers had been askew as long as Castiel could remember, always broken—which was to say that memory was a fickle thing, particularly for an angel who had been repeatedly altered, reset back to factory settings unceasingly.

 

Who knew what his wings had looked like when he had been born in light and sound and glory? Perhaps only Chuck himself.

 

Now his wings were worse than ever. What few feathers remained hung on by a thread, and they turned to dust if they so much as caught a breeze. They would regrow – they were always regrowing over the centuries, and that was part of what owed to making them look so scruffy – but new quills couldn’t emerge while the quick of the previous feathers remained. Ever since Castiel had lost his grace, he hadn’t groomed the ruined feathers free, and now every single one ached, like he supposed it ached for teething children.

 

He sat on the bed in the quiet, plain bedroom that Sam and Dean had afforded him in the bunker, his knees curled up underneath him, wings bowed across his shoulders, and plucked a single feather from the sensitive secondaries. It crumbled in his hand, offered some small relief, but the insistent pain remained.

 

“Cas?”

 

The door crept open and Castiel grimaced. There wasn’t enough time to hide away before Dean’s head appeared at the jamb. Cas tried not to watch his expression change, but change it did: from curiosity to surprise to horror.

 

Shame rushed in at once. Cas was an angel, and while he had no problem with Dean seeing him naked, or beaten in a fight, it was another thing entirely to be exposed like this. It was humiliating, and in a blink the wings were gone, vanished out of mortal sight like a light flicking off.

 

Dean didn’t vanish with them, and neither did the look on his face.

 

“Cas… Your wings?”

 

Castiel drew himself off the bed, straightening to his full height, regaining as much of his bearing as he could. But his hands still shook at his sides, and the dull pain continued throbbing inside his skull.

 

“Cas,” Dean repeated.

 

“It’s nothing.”

 

Dean worked his mouth, and then took a single step forward. “Hey, man. You’ve seen me at my worst. You can’t tell me it’s nothing.”

 

As usual, Dean was right, but Castiel didn’t know how to answer him. His wings were repulsive broken arcs of scarred feathers, stubby white quills, ash and dust. Nobody could ever look at them and love the creature to whom they belonged.

 

Dean moved closer while Castiel was still struggling to find words that might convince him to leave. The horror in his expression hadn’t gone, but there was pity there too, now, and somehow that hurt even worse.

 

“Show me,” Dean said.

 

“I can’t—“ Castiel began, reaching for the old lie that mortals couldn’t see his wings. Unfortunately Dean knew better, now.

 

“Yes, you can. Show me, Cas, come on. Show me.”

 

Castiel looked up at him, hopelessly, then offered his caveat; his lie. “As you wish. But you should know… I was in the middle of preening. They don’t look their best.”

 

He opened them once more, obedient to Dean’s demand. They were a wretched mess, and Castiel saw the horror come back to Dean’s expression at once. It almost made him flinch away all over again. He could always storm out—

 

He nearly jumped out of his skin as Dean’s fingers fluttered against the apex of his left wing, stroking against one of the few places where it hadn’t been stripped completely bald.

 

“Can I help?”

 

He was too stunned to have anything eloquent to say. “What?”

 

“Preening. You said you were preening. Can I help?”

 

“You won’t enjoy it,” Castiel warned.

 

“You’ve got honest to God wings, Cas. _Wings_. They’re incredible. Beautiful.”

 

“Dean, they’re…” He scrunched up his nose. “Have you lost your mind? Is there something wrong with your eyesight?”

 

It was the only explanation he could think of, searching Dean’s expression for some hint of an answer, hunting his gaze fiercely for signs of injury; maybe cataracts. Stroke. That was it, Dean was having a stroke.

 

“I’ll fetch Sam,” he suggested. “We may need to run some tests.”

 

“Cas, there’s nothing wrong with me. I get it, you’re ashamed of them. I don’t know why—“

 

Dean stopped talking when Castiel glowered at him, reconsidering his words.

 

“I get it, I do. You’re not the only person who looks at themselves and only sees flaws, Cas. It happens to the best of us: my bowed knees, my freckles, breaking my nose in that fight. But you have _wings_ , and okay, maybe they’re a bit beaten up, but to me they’re beautiful.”

 

“I find those things about you beautiful,” Castiel admonished, before he could stop himself. He could only hope his tone had been casual enough.

 

Dean stared right at him, apparently dumb struck, because the staring went hand in hand with silence. Castiel broke it with a loud cough, and arched his wings slightly forward toward Dean’s retreating palm. It settled again, more confidently this time.

 

“I accept your proposition,” he told Dean, earnestly. “If you still mean it.” At the very least, Dean could help him reach the feathers further back, fronds that Castiel would otherwise have to twist himself into contortions to pluck, causing more damage in the process.

 

Dean smiled, reflecting his hope back at him. “Of course I do. What do you need me to do?”

 

Careful to avoid knocking his wings into Dean in the process, Castiel shuffled around to face in the other direction. He took a breath even though he didn’t need to, presenting the wretched expanse, feeling self-conscious through every aching inch. There was so much trust inherent to this. Dean could take hold of living flesh instead of dead feather, drawing blood as he plucked it. This was an intimate process, usually done alone, but occasionally between angels who shared great trust in each other. Castiel had not had much assistance with his wings in some time, and it showed.

 

“Can you tell which feathers are coming loose?” he asked. “They aren’t lying flush against the others. You will need to remove them.”

 

“Are you sure?”

 

“Do you want to help me or not?”

 

Dean took hold of a dead feather and pulled, though not nearly hard enough. He seemed wary.

 

“Dean—“

 

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

 

“You _will_ hurt me,” Castiel instructed. “You have no choice. But if you don’t pluck the feather quickly, you will only cause me more pain. Like a band-aid. Be firm.”

 

Dean hesitated again.

 

“You wanted to help,” Castiel reminded, a little more forcefully this time. Dean had demanded to see his wings, asked to help him preen, exposed him to humiliation and a certain desperate hope. He hadn’t asked for Dean to intrude upon this moment, yet now he had Castiel could only imagine how terrible it would feel to be stood up.

 

Just as his anxiety reached a peak, Dean yanked hard on the offending feather, and it pulled free. Castiel’s left wing jerked forward, the muscles of his neck snapping from the pain, and he could feel Dean’s trepidation boring into the back of his skull a moment later.

 

“It’s okay,” he told him. Strain stretched the tone of his voice into something more desperate. “It’s necessary. Please.”

 

Dean took to the process. Though he seemed hesitant, even whispering apologies over Castiel’s shoulder at times, the usually torturous procedure was expedited with his help. Even so, with the amount of damage that his wings had sustained, Castiel was shaking all over by the time the last feather was pulled free. Ruined shafts covered the bed, some in a worse state than others, and Castiel stared down at them, numb against the sensation of soothing palms as they stroked across his remaining feathers. Dean’s hands skimmed the nubs of a thousand newly exposed quills delicately, tender in the places where his flesh was most abused.

 

Without meaning to, Castiel began to sob, overwhelmed with emotion as well as pain. Wordlessly, Dean gathered him into his arms, and the next thing he knew his face was pressed against his friend’s chest, Dean’s heartbeat loud in his ear like it was the pulsing centre of the universe. Castiel held his ear against it, and as he did it became the entirety of his world, a centre point around which everything else revolved.

 

Dean didn’t say anything. He held Castiel while it was all too much, feeling the burden of his years of freedom, of free will, turfed from Heaven and abandoned completely by his kin. He held Castiel without knowing any of it, without knowing how Metatron’s words had cut so deeply, without knowing how Hannah’s dismissal had shaken him. Even bearing the Mark, Dean still felt enough compassion to hold him without asking why, when Castiel had never broken down in front of him like this before.

 

Perhaps he was the only one in the world who could know how hard it was to be so impossibly strong all the time, presenting a vision of defiance while everything he was fell to pieces inside. Only Dean Winchester could know, and he would keep it secret.

 

When at last he thought that the tears had stopped Castiel pulled away, though he couldn’t bear to look his friend in the eye. Dean took hold of his jaw anyway and forced his face up.

 

“You good? You okay?”

 

Castiel’s eyes filled with blinding tears again, and he blinked them away hurriedly. This was why preening was so personal. It was raw and emotional. Particularly here, with Dean, when there was too much still unspoken between them. Dean’s knuckles brushed the tears away before they could fall, and Castiel felt his gratitude swell toward him like a cresting wave.

 

Dean must have seen something that frightened him in Castiel’s face, because his hand fell away, and distance was created between them almost instantly; a chasm of, like the Rio Grande at its widest, deepest point.

 

Castiel didn’t allow confusion to fill the space. After all these years, all the times that Dean had put space between them – physically as well as metaphorically – no part of the distance surprised him. Instead he allowed himself only the slightest pang of emotional pain, of loneliness, before shuffling it all away. Even after sharing this experience, Dean was still Dean.

 

“Alright,” Dean said, airing finality. “You ever need help with this kind of thing again you let me know. I’m gonna go check on Sam.”

 

“Dean—“ Castiel began. He curled his tongue around another silent word, perhaps two, almost bringing them to the point of speaking them out loud. The twisted uncertainty in Dean’s expression was more than enough to tell him how unwanted the words would be.

 

 _Please stay_.

 

“Thank you,” he said instead.

 

“You’re welcome. Any time, okay?”

 

That was as much as Cas could ever hope for: a casual encounter, a little emotional support, and Dean brushing him off as he walked away.

 

It was heartbreaking, but Castiel still didn’t have a word for the feeling, and with his grace returned to him, it made it even harder for him to grasp. He stared at the door once Dean was departed, and felt it slipping away.

 

The loneliness, though? _That_ remained.


End file.
